Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

The usual designs for DIY striplights involve a cardboard box or tube with a speedlight stuck into one end and one side cut away from the box (or a fat slit cut into the tube). The "SaberStrip" is the store-bought version.

This got me thinking about something like this for an Alien Bee, maybe something like the UBR reflector, only much taller and with the metal wrapped around a bit more (maybe 225 degrees instead of 180). Or a homemade version cobbled together from metal heating duct and white spray paint. (Putting cardboard right at the front of an Alien Bee with its modeling light and higher-powered flash tube is NOT something I'm going to do...)

But I thought I'd ask the older and wiser heads here about this half-baked idea first. If it's workable, I can see advantages over a regular strip softbox, in terms of a smaller footprint among other things. But would it be workable? Or is a strip softbox just that much better a solution overall?

I was wondering about this too...maybe if you can find a reflective silver roofing gutter, you could then cover the top of it w/ rosco diffusion and use a metal ring around the Einstein or AB and then use a convex car mirror reflector on the end of it. It'd be relatively easy to cut to 6' lengths. You can't collapse it though so it'd be a 6' tube + the length of the connector :-)

Hmm...or take a paper backdrop shipping container and cut it down and line it w/ aluminum foil and find a ventilation duct ring you could convert to a Balcar mount. It'd sitll be heavy though :-(

I have experimented with this type of design long ago, and concluded getting even coverage from top to bottom of the box was nearly impossible.

I don't think the icelight gets even coverage either nor do most stripboxes. It's probably a question of "good enough". Do something like a soft grad diffusion filter near the strobe head because that's where it'll be the brightest.
How much of a lighting difference did you see?

I still think the weight issue is the main problem unless the tube is made out of a thin plastic or something. I can just see my gutter hack falling over :lol:

Well, it was still worth asking about. People have managed to make it work "good enough" with speedlights, which meant there was a chance that it might be scalable with studio strobes.

I also found an oddball example where they used two Alien Bees, one at each end. http://www.diyphotography.net/shooting- ... trip-light Not the most practical setup.

I, like Paul, have put much thought into strip lights and see no way to get an even strip. A clue is to look at Broncolor and Profoto, they both use long flash tubes in their strip lights.